1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network search engines and, specifically, to search engines that allow a user to search for content such as images and video on a network.
2. Description of Background Art
Conventional network search engines allow a user to search for web pages and images by entering keywords. Such conventional search engines are used widely in Internet searches, although they can be used to search any large collection of information such as searching an enterprise network.
Traditionally, search engines determined what search results to return by matching words on the web pages to words in the search query. This method works well for text, but does not work as well for images and other non-textual data. For example, if the user enters “roadrunner,” images that are somehow labeled as being pictures of roadrunners are returned. For example, the query term may appear in html associated with the image. Obviously, this method results in a high number of search results that are not what the user intended. Many images are mislabeled or labeled in ways that do not suggest the subject of the image.
In addition, a textual query may have several different meanings and may legitimately relate to several different type of images. To continue the previous example, a query of “roadrunner” may results in pictures of both cartoon roadrunners, photographs of birds and images of a Roadrunner model of car. There is no way for the search engine to tell which result the user intended to locate, so it returns images relating to all possible meanings.
Conventional search engines have tried to solve this problem by counting a number of clicks on search results for a query and ranking future search results accordingly. This method does not perform satisfactorily because it does not move images or data deep in the search result toward the top of the search result. If an image is deep within the search result and is clicked on only by one or two persistent users, it will not migrate toward the top of future search results.
What is needed is an improved way of determining search results that are likely to correctly provide the information sought by a user who enters a search query.